At Virtual SC20, VMware’s Mohan Potheri, the company’s principal systems and virtualization architect, talked with us about the broadening array of approaches used by VMware’s HPC customers and the emerging technologies that facilitate those approaches. VMware’s reach, range and the company’s means of delivering solutions are core themes of its activities this week at SC20.
For example, Potheri discussed VMware’s joint HPC virtualization work with Nvidia:
We recently announced a strong partnership with Nvidia at both VMworld and Nvidia GTC…where we present our vision to our customers. Together we deliver an end-to-end enterprise platform for AI as well as plan to work towards a new architecture for data center, cloud and edge for next-generation applications.
Potheri is particularly positive about the potential of emerging Smart NIC (network interface card) technologies in which a general-purpose Arm CPU is embedded in the NIC, which Potheri said means:
…you can actually run applications on the NIC itself…, things like storage and network services on the NIC. Smart NICs also provide out-of-band management so you can manage it independently of the server CPU, you can have a server with a Smart Nic embedded in it, the server can have its own hypervisor and the Smart Nick can also have its own hypervisor, so you could run the hypervisor on the Smart NIC and have the server be bare metal… We believe the Smart NIC is truly a transformational technology.
